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The Bureau of Standards held a workshop today for producers and sellers discussing accurate measurement of bulk quantities. Sounds simple enough right? Just get a scale, pile on the product and measure it. Not sure that quite merits a whole workshop. Turns out it does, though, and we found that the information shared had everything to do with the price of rice, or should we say, the price of cane..? Director of the Bureau Jose Trejo explains.

Jose Trejo, Dir. – Bureau of Standards
“The importance of today’s workshop is to look at how we can become more competitive. The trade of bulk quantities and bulk commodities is very important both at the domestic level, simply because we want to ensure that consumers at the end of the day are getting value for money, for example when you buy a pound of sugar you want to make sure that the scale we use at the retail level are accurate and calibrated. In terms of our export markets, we want to ensure that when we are trading with our trading partners that the commodities that we export, for example sugar and citrus, are accurate. We want to ensure that when we export ten tons of sugar in the UK market, it is actually ten tons of sugar that they receive.

We basically do verification of scales both at the retail and industrial level so we want to look at the legislative framework and see how we can improve it to be more current with today’s market trends.”

Jacqueline Godwin,
Why?

Jose Trejo,
“Well it is important for us because our legislation is outdated for one. The legislation is quite outdated and for us to be at a competitive edge, we have to ensure that first and foremost we start with the legislation.”

Trejo says they hope to update the legislation on measurement.